Website Stability Returned to Normal

After switching hosts, one change that occurred was, I was no longer using a Plesk Control Panel which is what 1and1 VPSs utilized and a Virtuozzo container manager for the actual virtualized session restart and such.

As a result, I had to install applications one by one and configure them – which was a newer task to me even, as comfortable as I am in CentOS. The biggest issue was the installation of the SSL certificate. As it is a single domain certificate and not a wild card certificate I had to be very specific in my virtual host creation and even more so in my .htaccess work.

To ensure all traffic is encrypted through the SSL certificate, I have to redirect all traffic to the port 443 which SSL operates on but not via a mod_rewrite.c block in the web root .htaccess like one might with a wildcard certificate.

Apache and mod_ssl both have Virtual Host entries in their configs which dictate where to look for files to serve and what file to serve in specific to their type or name.

I achieved the redirection via the httpd.conf file redirecting permanently all port 80 (typical unencrypted HTTP traffic) is told to move from the web root as the folder to serve files from to navigate to the https://dev.lightspeedta.co address which a browser would know to look for port 443 to be open on the server at which point ssl.conf’s Virtual Host tells the browser to look also at the same webroot as httpd.conf but under the port 443 thus displaying as HTTPS.

Confusing? I know.

LightSpeedTaco